My first book, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1910-1991, (2000) is an historical and ethnographic analysis of race relations in the Andes.
My recent book Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015) is based on conversations with two Quechua speaking men that lived in Cuzco (Peru). Through these conversations we think together about life at the intriguing crossroads where modern politics (and history) and earth-beings (and the ahistorical) meet and diverge, thus exceeding each other. The book is an ethnography concerned with the concreteness of incommensurability and the eventfulness of the ahistorical.
Currently my field sites are cattle ranches and veterinary schools in Colombia. There I engage practices and relations between people, cows, and ‘things’ in general. Thinking at divergent bio/geo interfaces, I am interested in capturing “the stuff” that makes life and death in conditions of dramatic ecological and political change as the country endures extreme droughts and floods and wants to transition between the violence of war to a condition of peace that might not be without violence.